As the adventurous, formally trained Toronto percussionist Ryan Scott demonstrates with great skill on this two-CD set, many different sounds can be coaxed from a snare drum. The chain-mail-like snare that stretches across the drum’s underside can be switched on or off. The head of the drum can be struck—or rubbed, or scraped—with sticks, brushes, mallets, or, less conventionally, with a saxophone reed or a tuning fork. The rim and the shell are also there for the striking. Nevertheless, a 101-minute collection of fourteen snare-drum pieces by as many composers might strike even the most openminded music lover as a bit much. But fear not. Though that titular drum is dominant throughout, only Disc One’s hush, composed by Michael Oesterle, seems to be performed entirely, by more or less traditional means, on the snare drum—its press rolls and rata-tat-tat rim clicks evoking the instrument’s parade-band roots (marching to it, mind you, would be an insurmountable challenge).

Elsewhere, other drums and percussion instruments have walk-on parts, along with non-percussive (often electronic) instruments and human voices. Possibly under the influence of Steve Reich’s Different Trains, Brian Current’s Infantry; which opens Disc Two, calls at times for Scott to mimic, on his drum, the rhythmic inflections of taped reminiscences from once embattled soldiers. Only intermittently — for instance, the brief, charging tom-tom intrusions in Sepals (composer: Amy Brandon) — do any of the pieces incorporate something resembling a groove or straightforward timekeeping. This is music that both acknowledges and seeks to transcend the historical limitations and martial origins of what, in Scott’s hands at any rate, is a compellingly versatile instrument.